Compound votes on treasury delays and veto powers as DeFi governance strains

The proposal says that two of the five actions will assign EXECUTOR_ROLE and CANCELLER_ROLE to the Governor Timelock in relation to the Treasury Timelock. This means that governance can prevent the treasury from performing any operations rather than just reacting after the fact.

According to the latest vote count, there are 1.75 million votes in favor of the proposal, compared to 921,000 votes against it, far beyond the quorum of 400,000.

The reserve movements that prompted the vote

The proposal refers to actions by Compound’s treasury on September 29. The Treasury Management Committee transferred around $3 million in stablecoins to a separate Safe, which then used $2 million in USDC in a single-sided Uniswap V3 $COMP position. Advocates of Proposal 612 claim that the incident demonstrates the need for an enforceable pause in governance, not just a voluntary request.

The conflict existed before the action was taken. Cryptopolitan reported that a delegate has made allegations against the Compound Foundation of converting the amount of 8.42 million DAI stored in the DAO reserves into 344,780 $COMP. The delegate also claimed that the resulting voting power was used to influence treasury control and a $52 million V4 program. It is stated that the $COMP was subsequently sent back to its Safe 58 minutes prior to the closing of votes for Proposals 580 and 582.